We have a lovely house: hardwood floors, arched opening between the living room and dining room, classic styling, original gumwood trim. But the kitchen and bathroom are severely lacking. They look like they belong in an icky summer camp, not a lovely 1930 house.

chaos; crowded cabinets (cat)

more crowded cabinets

dark walls, dingy cabinets

Beyond being icky, the kitchen is extremely inefficient. It’s a U-shaped kitchen, and the corners are all blind. For both the upper and lower cabinets by the sink, the previous owners installed long cabinets with tiny openings. I can’t even reach the back of all of the corner cabinets—they’re 27” cabinets with 9” openings! Here is a crude, not-to-scale illustration of the upper cabinets:

As you can see below, you can really only use the part of the cabinet that’s right behind the opening—the rest is wasted:

opening/blind corner

It’s even worse on the bottom:

Shortly after we moved in, I designed an Ikea kitchen on their website. It’s amazing: carousels in all the corners, pull out drawers in the lower cabinets, a floor-to-ceiling pantry next to the fridge (I’d switch the fridge and the oven)! And it’s fairly affordable, especially since I prefer butcher block countertops. We’ve been planning on doing a full renovation: tear down the plaster & lathe, put up drywall, replace the uneven vinyl floor, move appliances, install the Ikea kitchen. But we’re looking at the end of graduate school, and the likelihood of moving, and well, it just didn’t look like it was going to happen.

Nevertheless, I hate the kitchen. I love to cook, which makes the icky inefficiency all the more frustrating. When we were flying back from Utah two weeks ago, I told Alan that I wanted to redo the kitchen, and that I would be in charge of the project and do most of it myself. We agreed on a budget of $1000 and two weeks, so it would be done before I started classes again.

My plans were:

-Tear out the upper cabinets, replace with open shelving

-Sell the portable dishwasher (we’ve never used it) and replace with a kitchen cart

-Paint the walls green and the cabinets white

I ended up:

-Tearing out the cabinets and putting up shelving on one side, reinstalling one on the other for closed storage

I took the lead on this project, and did all of the painting, removal of cabinet doors, hanging shelves and rails, and reorganization myself. My mom drove to Ikea with me (the Toronto Ikea is closest to us), which was super helpful. My dad installed boards on the wall—screwed into studs—on which I hung the metal shelves and rails. Alan took down the old hood and installed the microwave, including running a new outlet into the cabinet. Alan also helped me reinstall the cabinet doors, which is a two person job.

Without further ado, some before-and-afters!

open metal shelves

rails for organization

clean color palate

more efficient use of space

We had so little storage before that I had to keep a lot of things on the counter. One of my main priorities was to get things up off the counter. That’s why I installed the spice shelves (repurposed bathroom shelves) and the rails around the sink.

spice shelves

I especially love the bamboo dish rack. Here it is after cooking breakfast this morning:

And when I put the dishes away, I can just hang it back up!

As you could probably tell from the photos, we’re not quite done.

Yet to do:

-Trim the window by the pots & pans: about a year ago Alan took out a full sized window, and replaced it with a shorter one so that I could run a countertop along that wall. We need to cut down the old trim, and it’s a project that always seems to be on the bottom of the list (below residing the house, which we’re still working on).

-Make doors for the last cabinet: when we took the doors off the old cabinets, I decided to throw them away, certain we’d never reuse the cabinets. Famous last words, eh? I also need to cut some slim slices of wood to fill in the gaps around that cabinet.

-Touch up all the paint: wall and cabinet

-Sand down and repaint the Ikea island. I thought sanding would be enough, but I need to put a coat of bonding primer on. The paint that’s on is currently peeling off—oops.

But for now, it’s good—good enough for me to focus on school, which starts tomorrow (!). I’ll work on the last few jobs in evenings and on weekends. I am so, so happy with my new kitchen!

About two years ago, Alan and I hosted a work “party.” Many of our church friends and family came, and we got a *ton* of work done in one day. One of my favorite parts of that day was the painting. In one day, my friends painted the entire inside of our house. I had picked out a limited color palate, since our house is only about 1000 square feet. The whole house is tones of warm gold/beige, warm olive green, and muted lagoon-blue. And I love it.

But the outside of the house on the other hand…

siding before

I describe it one of two ways:

1. It’s like the previous owners went to Home Depot, and found picked two gallons of paint at random from the “poorly-mixed” section, and haphazardly painted the window trim.

2. It’s a bad lipstick red, and a foundation make-up beige.

I don’t like it.

Fortunately for me, the white siding on the house was breaking off, so Alan acquiesced to re-siding the house. (Yay!). I got to choose the siding color, and we went with “stratus,” a mid-toned warm gray. I chose a Martha Stewart color, Picket Fence, for the trim (and shutters eventually), and a nice yellow for the front door.

It’s taking some time to do the re-siding (I’ll do a whole post on the project soon). But I’m thrilled with the way the new color scheme is turning out.

Here is a picture from this morning:

porch before

partially painted porch

You can see the new gray siding, and the yellow door. I hoped to get the entire porch painted today, but had trouble wrangling the ladder. I only got painted as far as I could reach standing between the bushes and the porch:

I also painted the column on the right gray, which sets off the white of the porch even more. I’m thrilled to get rid of those horrible colors!

Here’s a tight shot of just the front door:

gray siding, yellow door

Most everything is in need of another coat (or two), but I’m beyond excited with the new color scheme. Hopefully all the foundation/lipstick will be replaced with gray, yellow and white in another two weeks or so!